Word.ws English Dictionary

obiter

obiter adverb: incidentally; in passing.

Adverb

obiter (not comparable)

  1. (formal) Incidentally; in passing.
    • I will not here stand to discuss obiter, whether stars be causes, or signs; or to apologize for judicial astrology., New York, 2001, p.206

Noun

obiter (plural obiters)

  1. An obiter dictum; a statement from the bench commenting on a point of law which is not necessary for the judgment at hand and therefore has no judicial weight, as opposed to ratio decidendi.

Forms of obiter

pluralobiters

Origin of obiter

Borrowed from Latin obiter.

Phrases with obiter

Questions about obiter

What does obiter mean?
Obiter means incidentally; in passing.
What part of speech is obiter?
Obiter can be an adverb or a noun.

Words near obiter in the dictionary

  1. obis
  2. Obispo
  3. Obispos
  4. obit
  5. obital
  6. obiter
  7. obiter dicta
  8. obiter dictum
  9. obiter scripta
  10. obiter scriptum
  11. obiters

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: obiter (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.

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